I may have been the only person watching NBC network news the night Tim Russert misspelled Iraq. At least I never saw any mention of it in the press at the time, nor in the obituaries and tributes that were published after his death on June 13. The misspelling was months before Russert’s death. On [...]

Has anyone among our mainstream political pundits noticed that however this presidential election turns out, the bankers can’t lose? The bankers I speak of are a strange pair of allies: former Sen. Phil Gramm, a right-wing Texas Republican, who remains an economic adviser for Sen. John McCain, and Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary for Bill Clinton [...]

If I were still writing editorials, I would comment on, and condemn, Russia’s use of its military against Georgia. I would also have something to say about the Bush administration’s huffing and puffing about Russian aggression. The point I would make is that the U.S. set a terrible example for how nations should behave with [...]

Any cop or lawyer can tell you that when two or more people witness the same event they are likely to come away with quite different versions of what they saw. So it is with a pastor’s interviews with the Presidential candidates at Saddleback church Saturday night.. The New York Times’ conservative columnist William Kristol [...]

Here we go again. In a mindless display of he-said, she-said journalism, the Washington Post gave its readers a front-page ad last week for books about Barack Obama, the most prominent being a hatchet job by the notoriously inaccurate “author” who maligned John Kerry in 2004. The New York Times had the day before published [...]

Sometimes our journalism makes it difficult to tell the sharpshooter from the target. That observation came to mind as I looked at how The Des Moines Register covers the Olympic adventures of hometown gymnast Shawn Johnson, the delightful 16-year-old with the refreshing ways and astounding talent. The way we do things in America put Ms. [...]

Could television journalists please banish to the dustbin the mindless words and phrases that are poisoning public discussion of politics? For example, “flip-flop” is used to disparage candidates for having changed their positions on particular issues. But do we really want to elect candidates with fixed ideas who decline to change when the situation and [...]

The saving grace of news coverage and commentary on the Beijing Olympics is the muscular young man on the rings or the graceful young woman on the balance beam or – take your pick of any of the astounding performances of strength, agility or endurance that come tumbling, splashing,  riding or racing your way in [...]

With help from the media, this past week proves that down and dirty campaigning can be considered a success. Economic collapse and suicide bombers in Baghdad were no match for the media’s rolling thunder that greeted the slime-time ad that John McCain approved regarding Obama’s canceled visit with wounded troops in Germany. As the New [...]

One would think that the American press, of all institutions, would be on the front lines of the battle to protect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights against the Bush administration, which has become a law unto itself. It has given us close to an imperial presidency, countenancing torture, extreme rendition, internal spying, outrageous [...]